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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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It may seem willfully perverse to find a
Pauline exploration of justification in Martin McDonagh’s
bloody, black comedy In Bruges. But
McDonagh is no stranger to crafting complex faith narratives for the selfish, profane, and
violent characters of his imaginary Ireland. In Bruges is McDonagh’s
first feature film, and it admirably translates into cinema
his preoccupations with intimacy among brutal people and spirituality among the
godless. More than his previous works,
In Bruges investigates the problem of the law and
its devastating effects upon lawless men yearning for grace.

The
law-grace combine so crucial to Christianity, and
especially to Lutheran thought,
takes on a pointed character
in McDonagh’s world of Irish hitmen on the lam. Ray
(Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) are mismatched criminal partners, the
former young and cocky, the latter aging and paunchy. They know
little of their assignment, only that Harry their boss (Ralph
Fiennes) has sent them to Belgium to the medieval town of Bruges where they are
encouraged to sight-see and relax and await his phonecall for further
instructions. Ken finds himself at peace absorbing the paintings and
architecture away from the bustle of the London underworld and its unpleasant
duties. Ray finds himself going stir crazy,
desperate for a nightlife of
booze and girls, hungry for the action of his bloody job, and
annoyed at the vagueness of their assignment and his partner’s
passivity.

We
soon discover that Ray's edginess and boredom have less to do with his
thrill-seeking desires than with an aching conscience that throbs whenever his
mind starts to rest. Bruges offers little distraction for Ray's uneasy soul,and visions of one
particularly horrible assignment that he botched becomes the insistent subtext
in all of his complaints. Though these characters live outside the civic legal
system—at least until they are caught—their internal sense of the Law nearly cripples them. Bruges becomes Rays purgatory and a place
of torment like that depicted in The Last Judgment triptych by
Hieronymous Bosch which they view in Bruges's Groeninge Museum.

One
subplot of In Bruges involves a film crew making what one character
describes as a “trumped up Euro-trash” art
film where Bosch’s creepy creatures and tortured souls
come alive. An American little person named Jimmy (Jordan Prentice) who has a
starring role in the Bosch film befriends the two hitmen and provides Ray an
entry point into the Last Judgment-style fantasia of the final sequence.
Ray’s own body receives wounds that mimic the
injured bodies in the Bosch triptych—a clever touch that emphasizes the
spiritual dimension of McDonagh’s crime narrative. The name of the town
itself—Bruges—comes from an old Scandinavian word “bryggia” meaning
“port”
or “landing.” Most
obviously this refers to the many waterways through the town and its importance
for medieval Europeans, but it also suggests a passageway for Ray
who finds himself caught in a state of judgment and uncertain of his ultimate
destination.

Ray
is wracked with guilt not for his countless crimes but for one grim bit of
excessive violence that I will refrain from describing here. Surprisingly, his
own moral code, which ought by all accounts to be nil, is
violated, and he is without a means for atoning.
Ken attempts to pronounce forgiveness upon him, but
this attempt is pointedly futile. The standard rationalizations—that everyone
makes mistakes, that they are men of a rough life bound
to incur casualties, even that there is no heaven or hell and
thus no ultimate consequences for any action—all prove unfit solutions for the
problem of Ray’s conscience. His sin is inescapable and
he is painfully aware of his imprisonment.

This dilemma perfectly exemplifies the problem that concerned St. Paul. As Krister Stendah has observed in his famous essay Paul Among Jews and
Gentiles (Fortress, 1976), Paul investigated “justification rather than
forgiveness.” Rather than the psychological problem of guilt and the
human-centered activity of being forgiven, Paul describe the God-centered
notion of justification which is cosmic in scope. As Stendahl puts it,

Paul's
thoughts about justification were triggered by the issues of divisions and
identities in a pluralistic and torn world, not primarily by the inner
tensions of individual souls and consciences. His searching eyes focused on the
unity and the God-willed diversity of humankind, yes, of
the whole creation.

Ray
cannot be released from his guilt simply by being forgiven. He requires instead
a realignment of his whole being with the law that judges him.

McDonagh
is preoccupied with Ray’s inability to be forgiven, and
the problem of his individual soul is complicated by the phonecall that reveals
Harry’s plan for his men in Bruges. When the
true nature of their assignment in Bruges is unveiled, the
moral onus shifts to Ken who finds himself unable to be the strict arbiter of
the Law required by Harry. Fiennes plays Harry in a delicious turn as a
lower-class English tough who has clawed his way into middle-class success with
a wife, kids,
and a vicious don’t-ask-don’t-tell
policy about his business. His viciousness is balanced by unswerving perfectionism
and a legalism which asserts that the death of innocent bystanders necessitates
suicide for the killer. Harry is a pharisaical executor, a
condition that precipitates the explosive finale.

These
explorations of law and grace emerged from McDonagh’s
initial visit to Bruges on holiday. He says that he was “stunned
by how beautiful” the city is and also found himself “a
little bit bored.” These two sides of his experience
produced Ken and Ray and later the reasons for their being in Bruges together
in the first place. The simple plotline of In Bruges seems calculated to
sell at a Hollywood pitch meeting: a pair of squabbling hit-men hide out in a
foreign city and eventually fight their boss. It’s the
buddy comedy mixed with the crime thriller and a dash of European class. This
simplistic recipe was pushed in the trailer which featured exasperated quick
takes by Colin Farrell and ended in gunshots which gave the film a clichéd
appearance further hindered by the awkward title. It is telling that the trailer
is not even included on the American version of the DVD.

But
McDonagh invests these clichés with liveliness that makes them seem fresh and
an undercurrent of moral seriousness drawn from his previous work in the
theater. McDonagh’s meteoric rise to literary prominence is
itself the stuff of movies. Raised in London by his Anglo-Irish family, McDonagh
worked a dead-end job and lived with his parents in the bedroom he had since
childhood. From this inauspicious position,
he dreamed of doing
something more valuable. Then,
in a week and a half while
his parents were away on holiday,
McDonagh sat at a child’s
writing desk that was in his room and scribbled out The Beauty Queen of
Leenane which would go on to win critical acclaim (including a Critics
Circle Award and a Tony nomination) and initiate his literary stardom.

This
play was the first of a trilogy about desperate, humorous, violent
people in Galway on the west coast of Ireland. The other two plays in the
trilogy—A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West—along with
another trilogy (The Cripple of Inishmaan, The
Lieutenant of Inishmore,
and The Banshees of
Inisheer) and a seventh play called The Pillowman were composed
hurriedly in the mid-1990s during the same period as his first work. Then, the
inspiration seemingly dried up,
and for nearly ten years
McDonagh reaped the benefits of that one outburst of creativity.

McDonagh admitted to feeling afraid
that his one unexpected year of creation was a fluke never again to be
attained. His playwriting aspirations were put on hold, and in 2006 he turned
his attention to filmmaking. This shift is not surprising; all of his writing
has been informed by cinema. He has said that the theater was not an important
part of his cultural education and cites instead the films of Quentin Tarantino
and Terrence Malick and punk bands like the Pogues as his primary influences.
Many of his plays call for special effects like blood squibs and prosthetic
body parts, devices more common to violent pop cinema than to serious stageplays.
But few filmmakers who trade in the darkly humorous violence of the Tarantino
variety manage more than lip service about the moral core of their works. Eli
Roth’s claims that his Hostel movies investigate serious issues like
American hedonism and the banality of evil are undercut by his obvious glee in
constructing gut-churning shockers.

McDonagh
is by no means averse to gleeful bloodletting, as
evident in his Oscar winning short film Six-Shooter (2006) that features
an exploding cow. Six-Shooter also stars Brendan Gleeson and functioned
as a remarkable calling card for future movie work like In Bruges. But
both of these films focus as much on the conflicted consciences of the
protagonists as they do on gory special effects.

Of
course, McDonagh’s dismissal
of theatrical influences may be part of a cultivated posture that emphasizes
his sui generis creativity rather than a typical artistic lineage. The
titles of his plays allude to other Irish classics. A Skull in Connemara comes
from Lucky’s monologue in Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot and The Lonesome West is Christy Mahon’s
description of rural Ireland in Synge’s Playboy of the Western World.
McDonagh’s self-conscious connection to the high
art of Ireland fused with a violent pop sensibility enriches his film and
elevates it above the post-Tarantino,
European peers like Matthew
Vaughn (Layer Cake [2004]) and Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock, and Two
Smoking Barrels [1998]; Snatch [2000]). These British crime thrillers display a formal
exuberance with their clever camera movements, cheeky
dialogue, and giddy violence, but
they lack the spirituality of McDonagh’s film. Though McDonagh clearly delights
in images of gunplay, his attention to law and grace infuses
his work with a seriousness worthy of St. Paul.

But the question remains: does Ray’s
dilemma ever find resolution? Is there justification that overcomes the
problematic insufficiency of forgiveness? In the final shoot-out, Harry, Ken, and
Ray continually create rules for each other. Harry won’t shoot at Ray when a
pregnant woman is nearby, and Ken won’t shoot Harry when they are standing face
to face. (Harry does shoot Ken in the leg, but only because he made him come
all the way to Bruges and a flesh wound seems only fair.) This
rule-making functions as their submission to the law, and
at every turn Ken tries to offer grace,
Harry tries to exact
punishment, and Ray tries to escape.

The
final volley of gunshots puts Ray in position to be a means of grace to Harry, to
offer more than simple forgiveness,
which would be obviously
futile. Harry, through an unlikely chain of events, finds
himself in the same moral dilemma that sent Ray to Bruges, and
his strict obedience to his gangsters’
law forces a swift and cruel
response for killing an innocent person. In a blood-choked whisper, Ray
tells Harry that he is mistaken,
that what appeared to be the
death of an innocent was merely a trompe l’oeil produced by the
Bosch-inspired movie set nearby. This whisper creates Ray’s
escape from judgment and shows unity with his enemy rather than their cycle of
guilt and punishment. No sense is given that Ray’s
conscience will be wholly appeased,
but in the midst of guns and
blood, McDonagh finds grace for lawless men.

Charles
Andrews is Assistant
Professor of English at Whitworth University.